


A Note for Your Thoughts

by DrHu



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Another story, F/M, Fluff, Post good ending, V's route, light spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 17:05:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12215130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrHu/pseuds/DrHu
Summary: Being an artist is never easy. In the dead of the night, Jihyun struggles to find inspiration and the courage to get over a block.





	A Note for Your Thoughts

**Author's Note:**

> _AKA art block is a bitch. Please note I named my MC Sora - for context, I imagined her with a career as a pianist._   
> 

Jihyun awakes with a start.

It’s not like he was getting restful sleep anyway. Anxiety shrouded him in his last moments of wakefulness before he settled into an uneasy slumber. His dreams had been plagued by ominous shadows devoid of any color, any sign of vibrancy, leaving him with an empty, aching feeling in his chest as he lay awake staring at the ceiling.

His face feels heavy as he grasps in the darkness, trying to find his bearings. The moon is still high in the night sky, a sliver of its light slipping through a slit in the curtains and dimly illuminating the bedroom. He’s tired, but he’s too agitated to go back to sleep.

Where is Sora? She hadn’t gone to sleep by the time he was in bed, and even now her side of the bed lays untouched. Jihyun rises and slowly walks out, not wanting to be too idle with his thoughts for too long.

He doesn’t bother turning on the lights as he steps through the silent hallways, even though he knows he should. There’s something soothing about walking through a home in the dead of night. The cool floorboards combined with the stillness help slow the overactive gears in his brain, and he feels his uneasiness ebb as he wanders.

His footsteps stop as he finds himself outside a particular room. His bleary eyes suddenly focus on the darkness as he takes in its contents.

A chair. Some paints strewn about. Paintbrushes piled on top of various sketchbooks. The room is, frankly, a bit of a mess, but he doesn’t mind. He likes the chaos, such a far cry from the tidiness of his previous studio. It’s a room that is distinctly his, a room that actually looks like it’s been lived in. She teases him about the clutter, but not even Sora has the heart to completely organize the room.

The only pristine object left in the room stands at the opposite end. A clean, blank canvas, sitting atop an easel, just the way he left it before going to sleep. Jihyun sits in front of it, staring intently at its untouched surface. He picks up a piece of charcoal and keeps his hand at the ready, hovering eagerly as he waits for inspiration to strike.

Seconds stretch to minutes. The minutes stretch further, made more painstaking by the silence. It’s so quiet he can hear the almost muted ticking of a clock out in the hall. So quiet he could hear the cogs turning in his brain…that is, if he had any.

A chill grips his heart, and it is then that Jihyun remembers the source of his nightmares. The still night air suddenly feels too empty, too sterile. The unmarked whiteness of the canvas seems to mock him, judge him, deride him.

In a moment of panic, Jihyun makes a wild strike across the canvas with the charcoal, hoping something will spark an idea. But the black line looks wrong, the white looks wrong, everything suddenly feels wrong, wrong, _wrong._

There’s nothing he can draw from, nothing inside him to paint. His skin crawls as if a thousand people are watching him. Cold, hard, callous, that’s what their stares feel like. he wants to crawl back inside himself, shut it all away so he can’t hear their cutting words.

His eyes start to ache a little.

V drops the charcoal and pushes the canvas away from him, hard enough that it nearly topples over. He suddenly feels disgusted being in this room, unable to look at the symptoms of his fruitless labor, and he leaves in a huff.

Out in the corridors, it’s not much better. There are no curtains to block the moonlight, but the dim, muted colors of the apartment aren’t enough to satisfy him. The night feels oppressive now, and everything around him feels like a ghost of what they once were. Without the light of the sun, they’re only pale imitations, shadows fluttering against the walls.

He wants to crawl back into bed. V wants nothing more to cover his head and shut his eyes tight. The darkness is empty, but at the same time it cannot hurt him. He wants to escape the fear that skirts at the edges of his thoughts, to look away from his inadequacy. The frustration is almost too much to bear.

It is then that a sound catches his attention. V hears the small squeak of creaking wood and notices a sliver of light down the hallway.

Of course that’s where she’d be, he thinks to himself as he silently steps towards the light. The familiar sound of a piano barely rings through, and V peers through the crack in the doorway. Sure enough, he sees Sora bent intently over the black and white keys, a slew of sheet music lined up before her.

He watches as she taps out a few notes before she hits the wrong key and stops. Sora groans, quickly marking up the already heavily annotated paper.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” she mutters to herself. “Maybe like…this?”

She plays the same series again, and it’s smoother. But moving onto the next set, she stops again and talks feverishly to herself. The same melody is played again and again, sometimes softer, sometimes faster, and she doesn’t stop until she finds something she likes, until she gets it right.

It’s mesmerizing, watching her work. There’s something comforting in it, and V finds a place to settle next to the door. The room is padded so thoroughly, it’s no wonder he never heard anything until the door slid open.

She plays chunks at a time, repeating as she revises and annotates. Quicken the rhythm here, bring out the harmony there. V loses track of time as he watches Sora huff and chug through her music. Frustrating breaks in the music don’t seem to bother her much, and he catches her listening to a recording for a bit before returning to her work.

It’s imperfect, a bit of a slog. Yet even in her most aggravated moments, Sora never seems to give up for long.

At last, she arrives at something she likes. Double checking her notes, she nods before taking a breath and positioning her hands. For a moment, V feels as if the whole world is holding its breath.

And then she plays.

It’s soft. Tender and warm, but with vigor. She strings together what were previously broken measures, weaving herself into the music as it marches along. He’s lost in the sound, and as the piano sings, it washes away the emptiness and the fear. V watches colors dance in the darkness, even as he closes his eyes.

…only for her to hit a sour note again, and the magic disappears.

He hears her curse softly inside the room and has to hold back a chuckle. As quietly as he can, V moves away from the door, and he finds himself in his room again.

Of course it hasn’t changed at all. The canvas continues to taunt him, but the stone cold fear does not return. It’s less of an indomitable wall now, and more a challenge to conquer. Difficult, but not impossible.

He picks up a few things before walking out to the living room. Sinking into an armchair, he takes a look around at the moon-bathed room and wonders what he found so ugly before. Muted the colors are, but there are plenty of things the moonlight draws out that the sun washes out.

His pencil scratches at the paper for a little bit before he looks out the window. Now that he’s taken the time to look, he sees what he missed before. It’s a clear night, the sky a beautiful dark shade of indigo. An ocean of stars stretches out behind the waning moon, and he needs to take a minute to savor the sight. They almost seem to twinkle as he stares, as if greeting an old friend.

The pain in his eyes is gone. Jihyun smiles and continues to scratch away.

* * *

It’s very late in the night when Sora realizes how much time she’s lost track of. She yawns, extremely aware of the heaviness in her eyelids as she cleans up the room for the night.

Walking out, she nearly yelps as she sees a long figure slumped in a chair in the living room. Sora nearly groans out loud when she recognizes Jihyun snoozing away, pencil and sketchbook in hand. Shaking her head, she carefully pries them away, bringing over a blanket to tuck him under.

“Your neck is going to kill you in the morning, you know,” she whispers as she just barely slips a pillow under his head.

Once he’s settled, Sora curiously peers into the sketchbook. He’d been having trouble lately with his art, and she was growing worried that he had hit a slump.

They’re only sketches, but she’s surprised at how much he’s gotten done. Sora sees outlines of potential pieces across several pages. On the last lined page, she sees a figure sitting at what seems to be a piano. Sora glances suspiciously at Jihyun, but saves her question for the morning. Sora places the sketchbook onto the table and shuts the curtains. She plants a quick kiss on his forehead before retiring to her room.

“Never give up, Jihyun. There’s always something to find within you.”


End file.
